No, it doesn't. A wingsuit I/E must hold a WS-I rating, and a WS-I candidate must be evaluated by an I/E.

Neither of these currently exist.

So the initial WS-I and WS-I/Es have to be ANOINTED by some unspecified process.

+1

Anyone want to guess who the Anointed Ones will be?

LOL...

And as floorMonkey says, what about all of those other disciplines that do not have discipline-specific "instructor ratings?"

As soon as an exception is made for wingsuiting, then GUESS WHAT, FOLKS? Any discipline without an equivalent "instructor rating" becomes lawyer food.

Get a clue, people. There is a small minority of people who stand to benefit from this "instructor rating" that is at complete variance with everything USPA has done with regard to sport parachuting instruction during its entire existence.

It rejects the private market solution which has proven to work across all of these other disciplines in favor of "crony capitalism" that forces people to purchase the services of "rated instructors" who are "anointed" (as the good perfesser so elegantly stated) by the association.

Those who intone that we "must" do this because the insurance companies won't insure our airplanes therwise are either misinformed or deliberately misleading the parachuting public.

Bottom line: The insurance companies do NOT care about a USPA-sanctioned rating system; they only want people to quit hitting the tails of the airplanes they insure. Period. Full stop.

And nothing about a wingsuit "instructor rating" speaks directly to that. It's all a smokescreen for a select few who hope to be the "anointed ones" at the expense of the rest of the sport.

Seriously, all of you who are involved in disciplines other than wingsuiting -- guess what's going to happen to the liability environment when there is a USPA-sanctioned, discipline-specific "instructor rating" for one discipline but not the others?

This is Politics and Liability 101, people, and all of you non-wingsuiters who support this "wingsuit instructor rating" are just cutting your own throats.

This whole thing is based upon an utterly bogus premise -- that somehow wingsuiting is "different" and "more dangerous" than other sport parachuting subdisciplines.

It is not, and everyone who says it is does not know the history of parachuting, never mind basic physics.

When people first started doing RW (aka "formation skydiving") it was frequently condemned as dangerous and foolhardy and a threat to jump aircraft.

Ditto for CRW, and when freeflying started, THAT was a threat because the higher speeds were incompatible and therefore dangerous to other freefallers.

Etc etc ad nauseam.

But guess what? We figured it out, didn't we? And all without imposing USPA-mandated sub-discipline "instructor ratings" that make the USPA bureaucracy proliferate and create endless liability permutations of which lawyers can take advantage.

Moreover and in many ways more importantly, the bureaucracy proliferation will literally strangle the sport because, you know, like, dudes and dudettes, why the F did we start skydiving in the first place?

For the freedom of it, the thrill of it, the adventure of it all -- not to be told at each and every incremental step of the way what to do, how to do it, when and where to do it, and only by those "anointed ones" who ride herd on us.

The "revamped" training system is bad enough. Add this ridiculous proposition to it and watch the sport slowly die because you will drive away the very people who are most attracted to its essential nature.

So please, instead of mindlessly accepting the feel-good premise of "standardized instruction," THINK IT THROUGH and consider all of the ramifications.